Renting AI vs Owning It: The Build vs Buy Arithmetic
Rent and own are both priced, and the crossover is arithmetic. A 25-person CPA firm on three published subscriptions pays $74,700 a year and passes a $15,000 example build in month 8. A 15-user home-services shop pays $5,724 and should keep renting. Stewardship decides most of the rest.
Thirty-two vendors, read on their own pages on August 13, 2026. Every rate is published or labeled an estimate; where none is published, this page shows what the URL returned.
Key Terms
Prototype validation: a working demonstration of the AI system on the operator's real data, delivered before payment; the prototype surfaces whether the diagnosed constraint is actually addressable by the proposed build. Integration surface: the set of APIs, data formats, and authentication mechanisms that connect an AI system to the operator's existing tools; the complexity of this surface is the strongest predictor of implementation timeline. Vendor lock-in: the cost and difficulty of switching away from a technology provider once data, workflows, and staff training are invested; per-seat SaaS (software you rent by subscription) creates lock-in through subscription dependency, while code ownership eliminates it. Build-versus-buy threshold: the annual cost of the workflow problem above which a custom build pays back faster than a subscription; our estimate for a mid-market operator is typically $40,000 to $60,000 in measurable leakage.
How these numbers were sourced.
Six rules governed the dataset behind this page. No price entered it without a source URL and a date checked. Any figure the vendor does not publish itself is labeled a third-party estimate. Where a vendor hides pricing, the absence is recorded with the URL and what it returned: a 404, a 403, a demo page, a login wall. And where an input has no published value, the answer is that it cannot be computed honestly, never an estimate in its place.
Nine of thirty-two vendors will tell you the price.
Nine publish a usable rate card: MyCase, Smith.ai, Karbon, Canopy, Jetpack Workflow, Botkeeper, Housecall Pro, Jobber and Dialzara. Four more publish part of one. The other nineteen route you to a sales call.
| Vertical | Publishes a rate card | What the checked URL returned |
|---|---|---|
| Legal | 2 of 11. Zero of the 6 legal-AI tools. | harvey.ai/pricing 404. legora.com/pricing 404. vlex.com terms 403. smith.ai/terms 404. |
| CPA | 4 of 11 in full, 3 more in part. | CCH Axcess 403 on all three product pages. UltraTax CS redirects pricing to a sign-in. |
| Insurance | 0 of 5. | Quandri /pricing 404. Applied Epic 404. Vertafore routes to contact-us. Ushur nothing. EZLynx states in writing there is "no single flat rate." |
| Home services | 3 of 5, counting Dialzara. | ServiceTitan shows three tiers, a Request Pricing button, no figures. Its Pro page has no pricing language. |
Insurance is the starkest finding: five vendors, zero prices.
What a stack actually costs, line by line.
What a rented stack actually costs once every line item is added, worked line by line for law, CPA and home services businesses using published vendor rates rather than estimates, so the break-even month against a comparable owned build is a real number rather than a guess.
Law: a 20-attorney firm, published tools only.
MyCase Advanced is published at $130 per user per month annually: twenty seats run $31,200 a year. Smith.ai's Pro receptionist plan is published at $2,100 a month for 300 calls, or $25,200. Two line items: $56,400 a year, $4,700 a month. Month 4 against a $15,000 build, month 26 against $120,000, month 11 against $50,000. Add MyCase Accounting at $39 a seat and it is $65,760: month 3, month 22, month 10.
Law: the one line item that crosses a build in a year.
Smith.ai's Pro plan is $2,100 a month and includes 300 calls. At 500 calls a month, 200 overage calls at the published $8.50 add $1,700. The month is $3,800; the year is $45,600. Answering the phone, one vendor, every figure on smith.ai/pricing, crosses a $15,000 build in month 4, $120,000 in month 32, $50,000 in month 14. Five years of it runs $228,000.
Law: the two cases we will not compute.
A 20-attorney firm on Harvey cannot be modeled. harvey.ai/pricing returns 404, and the estimates that exist are scoped to firms of 50 to 200 attorneys with a reported 20-seat minimum. The firm cannot learn the price without a sales call, and the 404 is the receipt.
CoCounsel Essentials fails differently. Thomson Reuters publishes nothing, and the only figure in circulation is a third-party estimate from the aggregator costbench.com, roughly $293 per user. That estimate does not say whether it is monthly or annual, and the readings differ twelvefold: $17,580 a year against $1,465 for five seats. CoCounsel also cannot be bought without a Westlaw base, whose price is likewise unpublished.
CPA: the cleanest case in the file.
A 25-person firm on Canopy Premium at the published $149 a seat pays $44,700 a year, the published Tax Resolution add-on at $50 adds $15,000, and Jetpack Workflow Premium at $50 adds another $15,000. Three published line items, no estimates: $74,700 a year, $6,225 a month. Month 3 against $15,000, month 20 against $120,000, month 9 against $50,000. A firm that size is typically steered to quote-only Enterprise pricing, so the published rate is likely a floor.
Tax prep is a separate line. Lacerte Pay-Per-Return publishes a $599 Fast Path license, $105 per individual return with one state and $148 per business return. At 500 individual and 100 business returns that is $67,899 a year: month 8, month 22, month 32. The return mix is our labeled assumption; the rates are Intuit's. Lacerte Unlimited, the edition that firm would buy, is quote-gated.
CPA: the two platforms you cannot price before signing.
CCH Axcess returns 403 on all three product pages and on the Wolters Kluwer terms of use. UltraTax CS redirects its pricing portal to an account sign-in, so price and license are visible only to existing customers.
Home services: the published stack that beats a build.
A 15-user shop on Jobber Grow prepaid annual is published at $320 a month, $3,840 a year, and the three published add-ons stack on top: Marketing Suite $948, Receptionist $348, Pipeline $588. Fully loaded, $5,724 a year, $477 a month: month 32 against a $15,000 build, month 252 against $120,000.
Housecall Pro is computable only in part. MAX is published at $299 a month annual with extra users at $35, so the base is $3,588 a year and each added seat $420, but the included-seat count was not captured, so a 25-technician total cannot be computed honestly. Smith.ai and Dialzara cannot be compared to each other either, one billing per call and one per minute with no published average call length. Both publish full rates, more transparent than every legal-AI and insurance vendor here combined.
Months to break even, at three build sizes.
Crossover month is the build fee divided by monthly rent, rounded up. Every row uses published rates. The $499 AI-Ready Audit (our published price) runs this same arithmetic against your own renewal invoices instead of a worked example.
| Worked example, published rates | Annual rent | vs $15,000 | vs $120,000 | vs $50,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20-attorney firm: MyCase, Smith.ai Pro | $56,400 | Month 4 | Month 26 | Month 11 |
| Same firm, plus MyCase Accounting | $65,760 | Month 3 | Month 22 | Month 10 |
| 20-attorney firm: Smith.ai Pro, 500 calls | $45,600 | Month 4 | Month 32 | Month 14 |
| 25-person CPA: Canopy, Tax Resolution, Jetpack | $74,700 | Month 3 | Month 20 | Month 9 |
| CPA: Lacerte Pay-Per-Return, 600 returns | $67,899 | Month 3 | Month 22 | Month 9 |
| 25-person CPA, leanest: Karbon, Jetpack Starter | $29,700 | Month 7 | Month 49 | Month 21 |
| 15-user home services: Jobber plus add-ons | $5,724 | Month 32 | Month 252 | Not modeled |
A crossover month is not the whole decision. Over five years the own side carries a recurring cost.
| Worked example | 5 years of rent | Owned, no retainer | Owned, with stewardship | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 attorneys, two tools | $282,000 | $15,000 | $125,000 at $15,000 plus light steward; $300,000 at $120,000 plus active | $120,000 plus active steward exceeds the rent |
| 20 attorneys, three tools | $328,800 | $15,000 | $360,000 at $50,000 plus active steward | Top build plus steward exceeds the rent |
| Smith.ai Pro at 500 calls | $228,000 | $15,000 | $125,000 at $15,000 plus light steward; $225,000 plus active | Five to one, before stewardship |
| 25-person CPA, three tools | $373,500 | $15,000 | $300,000 at $120,000 plus active; $360,000 at $50,000 plus active | Only case where the largest build plus steward stays under |
| CPA on Lacerte Pay-Per-Return | $339,495 | $15,000 | $125,000 at $15,000 plus light steward; $225,000 plus active | One line, before practice management |
| 25-person CPA, leanest stack | $148,500 | $15,000 | $50,000 at the top build, no steward | A $50,000 build loses outright |
| 15-user home services | $28,620 | $15,000 | Higher with any retainer | Owning wins by $13,620 over 5 years, but only after month 32 |
Optional care afterward is $997 a month, cancellable any time. It decides most of these comparisons. A build plus the active tier is $36,000 a year, larger than several complete rented stacks here.
To run your own: seats times the published rate times twelve, plus volume-priced tools at real volume, divided by twelve. Divide the build fee by that, round up, then compare five years of rent against the fee plus five years of stewardship.
Two illustrations built entirely from estimates.
THIRD-PARTY ESTIMATES, NOT VENDOR PRICES
A 25-user agency on Applied Epic. Applied Systems publishes nothing. Pricing-comparison blogs estimate $4,000 to $5,000 or more a month for a 25-user agency: $48,000 a year low, $60,000 high, plus an estimated $10,000 to $25,000 implementation. Against $15,000 that is month 4 at the low end; at the high end cumulative rent equals the fee at the end of month 3. Against $120,000, thirty months and twenty-four. Five years lands between $240,000 and $300,000, none of it quotable as Applied Epic's price.
A 25-technician shop on ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan publishes zero pricing. Third-party estimates put the base at $245 to $398 per technician per month: $73,500 a year low, $119,400 high, plus an estimated $5,000 to $50,000 setup. Against $15,000, month 3 and month 2; against $50,000, month 9 and month 6. Five years lands between $367,500 and $597,000. The spread is $45,900 a year, larger than our smallest commission; a midpoint would hide that.
What the contracts actually say about your data.
What the vendor contracts themselves actually say, read directly rather than assumed, about training on customer data, deletion timelines after cancellation, and export rights at exit, across legal, CPA, insurance and home services software, plus the exit-window clause almost nobody reads before signing and the fair counter-argument for the other side.
One reading rule: "not stated" is not "bad"; it means a buyer cannot find out before signing.
Legal.
| Vendor | Trains on your data | After cancellation | Receipt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harvey | No: "will not train any AI models using Your Content or Customer Data" | Deletes within 30 days | harvey.ai |
| LexisNexis | No: inputs "will not be used by LN to train any large language model(s)" | Not less than 60 days, then may delete | lexisnexis.com |
| MyCase | No for raw IQ Content, but holds "a perpetual license for aggregated, anonymized versions" | 30 days read-only, then deleted | mycase.com |
| Filevine | Not stated | Not guaranteed: "may, but is not obligated to, delete" | filevine.com |
| Smith.ai | Not stated publicly | Not stated publicly | smith.ai/terms 404 |
Read the Smith.ai row twice: a vendor holding law-firm call recordings with no public statement about what it does with them. Legora is the other tell, promising "Zero AI training on your data" on a homepage while its privacy policy excludes Subscriber Content.
CPA.
| Vendor | Trains on your data | After cancellation | Receipt |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vic.ai | Not in those words, but "Vic.ai exclusively owns Derived Data, including all intellectual property rights therein" | Return-or-destroy covers Confidential Information only | vic.ai |
| Blue J | Yes in substance: permission "to review all inputs... and corresponding outputs," no opt-out | Silent; only access ends | bluej.com |
| Canopy | Not stated; you are "solely and exclusively responsible for the backing up and archiving" | No hard delete; moves to Freemium, no preservation guarantee | getcanopy.com |
| Jetpack Workflow | Not stated; backup burden on the firm | "we may erase all of your account data from the system within 90 days" | jetpackworkflow.com |
Botkeeper belongs beside them: Derived Data is kept for "any business purpose" in perpetuity. Vic.ai and Blue J are the cleanest receipts for the sentence operators rarely hear: you can own your data and not own what it built.
Insurance.
| Vendor | What the terms say | After cancellation | Receipt |
|---|---|---|---|
| EZLynx | Section 12: information "that you submit to the Sites shall become the sole and exclusive property of Applied" | Not stated | ezlynx.com |
| Vertafore AMS360 | "Vertafore retains exclusive ownership of Aggregated Data," plus de-identified data | Not found in the excerpts retrieved | Vertafore Standard Terms 2023 |
| Applied Epic | Not stated; no Epic terms page exists publicly | Not stated publicly | appliedsystems.com, 404 |
| Ushur | Customers grant a license to "use, reproduce... store, and archive customer information" | Not found | ushur.ai |
| Quandri | Not stated; the Terms of Use cover site-content IP only | Not stated publicly | quandri.io |
Three caveats, in the open rather than a footnote. The EZLynx clause says "to the Sites" and sits in the website Terms of Use, so whether it reaches data entered inside the product is a real ambiguity counsel would raise; it does not support the paraphrase that EZLynx owns your book of business, and must not be attributed to Applied Epic, a different product under the same parent. The Vertafore language is from search-index excerpts of a non-extractable PDF, not a verbatim read.
Home services.
| Vendor | Trains on your data | After cancellation | Receipt |
|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceTitan | Yes but scoped: may "train, tune, and improve AI models solely to provide the Service to Customer," never "for the benefit of any third party" | "not obligated to retain... greater than 60 days" | servicetitan.com |
| Jobber | Not in those words, but Section 6 grants a "perpetual, irrevocable... license (with the right to sublicense)" | Deletion on request, per the privacy-policy schedule | getjobber.com |
| Housecall Pro | Not stated; may "disclose to third parties any such customer data as may be necessary" | Not addressed for customer data | housecallpro.com/terms |
Workiz belongs here too: it "may permanently delete Pro's Pro Content." Jobber is the cheapest published stack here and carries its broadest license grant; price alone shows only the first.
The exit window nobody reads.
The claim that vendors never give your data back is false, and this page's own dataset would refute it. The defensible claim is narrower and worse: the exit exists only if you know the window, and the window is short, undisclosed or absent more often than not.
Dext allows ten days from termination to make a written request. Harvey deletes within thirty. MyCase gives thirty days read-only. LexisNexis retains not less than sixty. ServiceTitan is not obligated beyond sixty, and its export is "commercially reasonable efforts" rather than a guarantee. Clio reportedly allows ninety and Jetpack Workflow may erase everything within ninety. Twenty-four of the thirty-two have no export mechanism at all, and a firm that cancels Dext and goes quiet loses everything on day eleven.
The fair counter-argument, and the vendor that disappeared.
The strongest published data terms here belong to competitors: LexisNexis a no-training warranty and a named sixty-day export window, ServiceTitan the clearest AI-training clause surveyed, Dext the most concrete export mechanism in the file. Naming them is what makes the rest of this page worth reading.
The counterweight is not hypothetical. In February 2026 Botkeeper announced an abrupt shutdown after eleven years and roughly $90 million raised, per Accounting Today, Inside Public Accounting and CPA Practice Advisor. Xendoo acquired the platform within two weeks and relaunched it as Botkeeper Infinite: those firms kept their workflow but inherited a counterparty they never chose.
The same cost model is run vendor by vendor on the alternatives pages, including the property and commercial real estate incumbents: Yardi Voyager alternatives and RealPage alternatives on the operations side, and CoStar alternatives on the market data side, where the honest answer runs the other way: the licensed comparables data is not something a commissioned build replaces.
Construction has the same shape with a harder edge, because none of the incumbents publishes a price at all: Procore alternatives, Sage 300 CRE alternatives and Trimble Viewpoint alternatives, where the annual maintenance percentage on a licence somebody else holds is the line that compounds.
When renting is the right answer.
This page argues for owning over renting AI, and two worked examples from the CPA-firm and home-services comparisons earlier on it actually disconfirm that argument, so they belong here too. A 25-person CPA firm on Karbon Team and Jetpack Workflow Starter pays $29,700 a year, or $148,500 over five years. A $50,000 build loses that outright with zero stewardship, and does not break even until month 21. A firm on the cheapest tiers of two workflow tools does not have a subscription problem.
Five years of a fully loaded 15-user Jobber stack costs $28,620, which is now $13,620 more than a $15,000 example build with no care plan at all, though the build does not break even against that rent until month 32. Pitching a build to that operator as a way to save subscription money in the short run would still be a false claim; the case only holds on a multi-year horizon. If a build is right for them before month 32 it has to be justified on revenue captured or labor displaced, not on rent avoided.
The same restraint applies at the small end. Blue J publishes an Individual plan at $1,498 per user per year scoped explicitly to sole practitioners, which is the right instrument for a solo shop. Subscription software is a good deal for firms whose workflow looks like the average the product was built for, and our five-test framework for off-the-shelf versus custom routes those operators away from a commission.
What owning it actually means here.
The commission is a fixed fee against a written scope, in two installments, one at production-build start and one at handoff. No hourly, no seats, no subscription. A focused build starts at $15,000, an operations rebuild is quoted after the $499 audit, a platform commission is quoted after the $499 audit, and care afterwards is optional at $997 a month.
The system ships inside your own cloud tenant under NDA (a signed non-disclosure agreement). At handoff you receive the source code and architecture documentation, plus the prompts, models, datasets, runbook (the written operating instructions) and integration docs, and you own it. No proprietary runtime to license, no per-seat fee to renew, and cancelling stewardship does not touch your possession of the build. Those terms sit on our process and pricing pages, not in a document you receive after signing.
One honesty note: that describes our offer as we publish it, while the vendor rows above come from binding contract text a buyer can read before signing. Ask us for the receipts you would ask a vendor for. Across forty-plus commissions the pattern is unglamorous: stewardship is the only recurring line, and it is optional. Voice systems we have commissioned, including five channel-specific agents at Jim Glaser Law, have handled 3,787 calls and 5,514 minutes there alone, measured in the client's call platform, August 2026, part of more than 6,000 calls handled by commissioned systems overall, and Jim Glaser Law takes reference calls.
Build versus buy, answered directly.
Direct answers to the build-versus-buy question itself: whether building is cheaper than buying, what AI subscriptions actually cost a mid-market firm, when renting is genuinely the right call, data ownership inside a subscription, what happens at cancellation, and why so few AI vendors publish a price at all.
Is it cheaper to build AI or to buy it?
It depends on what you already spend. A 25-person CPA firm on three published subscriptions pays $74,700 a year and passes a $15,000 example build in month 3. A 15-user home-services shop on a loaded Jobber stack pays $5,724 and does not pass one until month 32.
What do AI software subscriptions actually cost a mid-market firm?
On published rates, a 20-attorney firm on MyCase Advanced and Smith.ai's Pro plan pays $56,400 a year, or $65,760 with MyCase Accounting. A 25-person CPA firm on Canopy Premium plus Tax Resolution plus Jetpack Premium pays $74,700. Lacerte Pay-Per-Return at 600 returns is $67,899. For most legal-AI tools and all five insurance vendors, nothing is published.
When is renting AI the right answer?
When your spend is small enough that the crossover sits years out. A 25-person CPA firm on the leanest published stack pays $148,500 over five years, so a $50,000 build loses outright. A 15-user home-services shop pays $28,620 over five years, now $13,620 more than our smallest $15,000 commission, though that commission does not break even against the rent until month 32. Blue J's Individual plan at $1,498 a year is right for a sole practitioner.
Do we own our data inside an AI subscription?
Usually you own the data and not what the data built. Vic.ai's agreement says it "exclusively owns Derived Data, including all intellectual property rights therein." Blue J's grants permission "to review all inputs made by Users into the Product and corresponding outputs," no opt-out. Harvey, LexisNexis, CoCounsel and Spellbook do commit to no training, explicitly.
What happens to our data if we cancel?
It depends on a window you have probably not read. Dext requires a written request within ten days. Harvey deletes within thirty. MyCase gives thirty days read-only. LexisNexis retains not less than sixty, ServiceTitan is not obligated past sixty, Jetpack Workflow may erase everything within ninety. Twenty-four of thirty-two have no export mechanism at all.
Why do so few AI vendors publish their prices?
We will not guess at motive, but the pattern is reportable. Nine of thirty-two publish a usable rate card. Zero of the six legal-AI tools do. Zero of the five insurance vendors do: Quandri 404, Applied Epic 404, Vertafore contact-us, Ushur nothing, EZLynx "no single flat rate." CCH Axcess returns 403 and UltraTax CS redirects to a login wall. Stacking is easiest to miss when each line arrives through a sales call.
What we could not source.
This dataset contains zero manufacturing vendors, so no manufacturing rent-versus-own claim appears here. Clio, CCH Axcess, TaxDome, vLex and the Wolters Kluwer terms pages returned 403 to automated fetch, so anything attributed to them is third-party or search-index-derived. The Housecall Pro included-seat count was not captured, which is why the 25-technician total is missing rather than estimated. The Dialzara record is incomplete beyond its rate card and excluded from every crossover calculation.
Two neighboring arguments cover the rest: generic SaaS AI versus a custom commission on category fit, and why code handoff matters on ownership after the build ships.
Questions about the commission itself
The arithmetic above compares what a subscription costs against what a commission costs, but the commission itself raises its own questions before anyone signs anything: what happens if the prototype misses, how long the whole path actually takes, what the operator has to show up for, and whether owning the system changes staffing. Four answers, stated plainly.
What happens if the build does not work.
The 7-to-10-day prototype is tested against a target written down after the audit call, on your own data. If it misses, you owe nothing beyond the audit and keep the work product; the production-build fee is only due once the prototype has already worked.
How long the whole path from audit to owned system takes.
Audit report in 3 business days, a 20-minute call, a 7-to-10-day prototype, then a 4-to-6-week build. Total time from ordering the audit to a handed-off system is typically 6 to 8 weeks (our estimate, adding the four published steps above).
What is expected of you during the commission.
An owner or operations lead who signs the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) covering the data slice used for the prototype, commits to the audit call, and stays reachable during the build. No dedicated IT department is required.
Will owning the system mean replacing staff.
No. The recurring pattern across ColabContent's commissions is that operators reclaim capacity from repetitive work and grow into it, rather than cut headcount; the same holds whether the alternative being compared is a rented subscription or nothing.
Run your real invoices through it.
The $499 AI-Ready Audit. Bring your last renewal invoices and we will run the crossover arithmetic against your real spend. Two of the seven worked examples above end in keep renting, and yours may be the third.